Alex James flies a Supermarine Spitfire

Telegraph columnist Alex James fulfils a lifelong dream – and sheds a
few tears – in a Supermarine Spitfire.

I have always loved flying machines. I got my pilot’s licence 15 years ago at a time when I was living out of a suitcase with the band. Travelling in a light aircraft was the best way to get around. Blur’s drummer, Dave Rowntree, and I used to fly a heap of a Cessna – that stank of fags and stale takeaways – from city to city on tour, a flying white van. But until last week, I’d never got near the controls of a fighter.

The Spitfire is unique among the warbirds that thronged the skies in the Second World War: the only aircraft that was in service both at the beginning and at the end of the conflict.

I was given the chance to join the Boultbee Academy, a Goodwood-based flying school that compresses as much as possible of what actual trainee Spitfire pilots learnt into a two-day course.

Teaching begins, just as it did in the Thirties and Forties, with a Tiger Moth, progressing to a more powerful Harvard, before moving on to the Spitfire on day two. The Tiger Moth is a good place to start. It’s a simple machine, a biplane made from wood and canvas, dating from 1931. It was described in the preflight briefing as “a pretty good aeroplane until the RAF got hold of it”. The design was changed by the military – the top wing was unceremoniously moved forward in fact, to make it easier for pilots to bail out.

Air fix: Alex James, second from left, with fellow pilots and his instructor at Boultbee Academy

It’s great fun in the open cockpit, but it doesn’t feel very well balanced. Airborne, everything about it is a bit wobbly and it feels like it might just creak and fall out of the sky at any minute.

The Harvard is more stable. It has a lot more power and a more sophisticated propeller system, but it’s a clunky brute of a thing next to the Spitfire which is, of course, the reason we’re all here – me and the five other pilots taking the course, who range, incidentally, from a 747 captain to a recreational pilot, and the son of a Spitfire squadron leader.

Even parked in the hangar a Spitfire is a breathtaking sight. Well, it’s a Spitfire for goodness sake! But even so, it had quite an impact.

Alex is bowled over by the Spitfire

I can’t recall being moved quite so viscerally by anything fashioned by human hands or minds. Not ever. Not even Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band or the Mona Lisa, or the ancient temple of Quetzalcoatl at dawn.

It’s a hell of an eyeful because it is so emotive and emblematic. But most of all, as you gradually realise when you are alone together, from whichever angle you look at it, it is utterly beautiful. Everything about it is graceful and elegant. That elliptical wing, the proportions of the propeller, the decals which we stuck on to Airfix models as children and, most of all, the proud 12-and-a-half degree angle at which it sits against the ground – a tangent to a sea of pleasing curves.

And it goes like stink. The Hawker Hurricane still had a lot of wooden parts, but the Supermarine Spitfire is an all-metal airframe. It was designed as an interceptor, for shooting down enemy aircraft and had a top speed of 450mph (the airspeed indicator reads mph rather than knots) which is delivered by the 1,000-horsepower liquid-cooled Rolls-Royce Merlin engine at the front.

It was announced at the last minute we’d be flying two Spitfires in formation and after a quick briefing on formation flying we were off.

Most modern aircraft have a tricycle undercarriage with a nose wheel, but all three aircraft on the course are taildraggers. The tail wheel arrangement takes a bit of getting used to on the ground. The upward angle of the cockpit means you can’t see anything directly in front of you so taxiing is hard work and the take-off roll is quite counterintuitive because if you can actually see the runway, you’re in big, big trouble. Becoming airborne, the spinning propeller creates a gyroscopic force that has to be counterbalanced by the rudder or the tail will swing around and overtake the nose (known as a “ground loop”). So it is a tricky business, particularly with a crosswind.

Runways were a different affair during the war. Back then, they often used the whole field, taking off and landing directly into wind.

It was all wrong until there was enough airspeed to lift the tail wheel off the ground and then everything was clear – apart from the fact that I was crying like a baby.

The imagery is potent. The green fields of England, the proud coastline and most of all, the other Spitfire, less than a wing’s length away. It was devastating.

The most surprising and wonderful thing of all about the Spitfire is that it is an unparalleled joy to fly, with the sound and warmth of the Rolls-Royce engine – oodles of power perfectly balanced by that beautiful airframe – and a cockpit that makes you feel cocooned and safe.

Alex James in the air

Normally flying upside down is terrifying and feels completely wrong but not in the “Spit”. It’s a bit like being able to breathe underwater and in next to no time I was turning somersaults.

I gently moved the control stick towards me so that my feet were sitting just above the horizon – sending her into a 200mph zoom climb. Pulling 4G (feeling four times my body weight) while laughing my head off, I gave the stick a slight nudge to the right with my fingertips and we turned a victory roll. And that is easily the best thing I have done in my whole life.

We threw a few loops and did a couple of formation fly-pasts before landing breathlessly half an hour later.

The aircraft had the same effect on the other students, all of whom were overcome in some way, either speechless or actually crying.

“Did you know the guy you were flying with used to be the leader of the Red Arrows?” one of them asked. Come to think of it, he wasn’t even the guy leading the formation — goodness knows what his CV read like.

Apparently a space shuttle captain had done the course the week before and said it was the best flight of his life.

Probably all men dream of being a pilot at some time or another and all pilots want to fly a Spitfire. It is one of those rare things that is even better than it sounds – and better than you could possibly imagine.